On Friday, the President of Consob, Paolo Savona, lashed out against the new European crypto regulation, namely the so-called MiCA (Market in Crypto Asset).
He did it during his speech at the Festival dell’Economia di Trento, and his words were then recorded and published on the agency’s official LinkedIn profile.
Paolo Savona against MiCA and cryptocurrencies
Paolo Savona has declared that he considers the legitimization of cryptocurrencies a fatal risk.
The fact is that the MiCA, which all EU countries must comply with, effectively legitimizes the crypto markets, even if this does not mean that it legitimizes all criptovalute in themselves.
However, Savona went even further, stating that he finds himself in a situation of conscientious objection, given that as the president of Consob, he is directly involved in the application of MiCA.
He added:
“I do not want to put my seal on the legitimization of cryptocurrencies.”
Subsequently, he also subtly hinted at the possibility of resigning as president of Consob, because he expressly stated that he is willing to accept the consequences that arise from this objection of conscience, given that as a citizen he is now required to know the validity of MiCA.
The resignation of Paolo Savona as President of Consob
Obviously, however, the resignations were not submitted.
Given that there is no alternative to the full and precise reception of the MiCA in Italy, at this point according to his words he should resign, or wait to be replaced, but in the event that the government decides not to replace him, the only alternative would be resignation.
In fact, the deputy of Fratelli d’Italia Marcello Coppo later commented on his X profile on these statements saying that Savona has exaggerated, because he wants to impose his opinion at the expense of the laws and democracy.
Fratelli d’Italia is the party with the relative majority in Parliament, and it is also the party of the current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, so Coppo’s words cannot be ignored.
Now it will be necessary to understand if the government intends to replace Savona at the helm of Consob with another person, or if Savona will resign. If he were to resign, it would solve the problem quickly and easily, but for now his resignation has not yet arrived.
Savona and politics
Paolo Savona is an Italian economist and politician born in the distant 1936.
In 1993, he was appointed minister of industry, commerce, and craftsmanship, while in 2018, he was appointed
minister for European affairs. Since 2019, he has been the president of the National Commission for Companies and the Stock Exchange (CONSOB).
Note that both of his experiences as a minister lasted less than a year, and that today he is almost 90 years old.
In 2018, his appointment as Minister for European Affairs was highly debated, because in reality the then Prime Minister-designate, Giuseppe Conte, proposed him as Minister of Economy. The President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, raised some concerns about this appointment, because Savona was a supporter of Italy’s exit from the euro.
Thus, the Lega, which was sponsoring Savona at the time, ended up proposing him as minister for European affairs. The year after the first Conte government, the one supported by Lega and Movimento 5 Stelle, fell, even though Savona’s resignation from the ministry for European affairs had been given several months earlier so that he could be appointed to the presidency of Consob.
Savona and the Consob
Therefore Paolo Savona was appointed president of Consob six years ago, at the venerable age of 83, with the support of the Lega.
Note that the Commission is composed of only a president and four members, appointed by decree of the President of the Republic on the proposal of the President of the Council of Ministers, after deliberation by the Council itself. They remain in office for seven years without the possibility of reappointment, so next year the Savona presidency is destined to end.
The other four current members of the Commission are Chiara Mosca, Carlo Comporti, Federico Cornelli, and Gabriella Alemanno.
The Italian Consob oversees the financial markets, therefore also effectively overseeing the crypto markets. Since Savona took the presidency, he has always railed against criptovalute, so much so that now that the MiCA effectively forces Italy to legitimize the crypto markets, he finds himself in a difficult position to maintain.
Savona and cryptocurrencies: resignation from Consob or acceptance of MiCA?
The speech by Paolo Savona on Friday at the Trento Festival of Economics was specifically dedicated to cryptocurrencies, as it was titled “Legitimization of cryptocurrencies and risks for the securities markets).
On X there is a circulating excerpt of about 4 minutes from that speech in which Savona expresses his doubts.
The first concern he expressed is that there is a risk that the new generations will lose the understanding of money.
The second is that there is a risk that private currencies, that is, cryptocurrencies, could replace the public one, because more profit is made.
He also mentioned the usual tulip bubble of the seventeenth century, but got the century wrong (he said sixteenth, but the tulip bubble occurred in 1637). It should always be remembered that that bubble lasted only a few months, while Bitcoin, for example, has now existed for sixteen years.
At a certain point, he literally started ranting about mining.
The ignorance of Savona
He said:
“The miner creates a tool on the computer using, as you young people do, all the mechanisms offered today by artificial intelligence or, in general, by computer technology”.
Instead, the miners do not create any tool on the computer.
First of all, nowadays computers are no longer used to mine Bitcoin, but specific machines called ASICs.
Furthermore, to mine, a program is installed and executed without creating absolutely anything, but only to generate the text string (hash) that is used to validate the blocks.
Finally, artificial intelligence is not used in any way, but only random number extraction and simple calculations to try to understand if one of the billions of billions of randomly generated hashes is precisely the one that validates the block.
The rant of Savona then continued, because he started talking about the websites of numerous fraudsters who use words like Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to try to steal money from the unsuspecting, without actually having anything to do with Bitcoin.
It is evident that the octogenarian president of the cryptocurrency Consob understands very little.